Bloodstone Heart (21 page)

"We can't give him the stone or the Order will grow too powerful," Blake said.

"So what? I don't care if the Order is too powerful; I just want to get Lanie out of danger. Besides, the Protectors of All Life will get rid of them when someone bigger or badder wants the power, so let them kill themselves and let us be.”

"You really think that they will let both of you live knowing what you know about the Order and the stone?"
 

"I don't know. I just know that eventually Dimitri's going to catch up to Lanie and I have no abilities or plan to save her."

"I know you're frustrated, Josh. I would be too, but we have a lot more information on him now and we will come up with something that we can use against him."

"When?

“I don't know."

"That's not good enough. We're just sitting here while she is in all the danger. For all we know, he could have her now!"

"If he had her, he'd know you and the stone weren't with her and the first place he'd look would be here," Blake said.

"Great, so not only is Lanie in trouble, we'll all be in danger, any minute."

"What I'm trying to say, Josh, is that we'll be the first to know if he catches up with Lanie."

"This is insane! I have to get out of here!" Josh got up, jacket in hand, and headed for the door.
 
Blake had him in an instant, pinned to the wall. Surprising to Blake was the effort it took to pin him.
 
If he hadn't known better, he would have thought Josh to be as strong as a starved vampire. He shrugged off the thought for the moment.
 

"I know you are going nuts. Frankly, if it were me, I would have lost it a lot sooner than you have. I feel for you, man. I wish I could do something right this instant and make everything great again, but I can't. If you leave now, you put Melanie, yourself, and all of us in danger. If Dimitri has the house being watched and you go sauntering out, it's all over."

"Get off me, Blake," Josh said in a low, angry, defeated voice. Blake let go of Josh's arms and backed away from him.

"I'm sorry, Josh, but I couldn't just let you go out there."

With head lowered in shame or disgust, Blake wasn't sure which, Josh headed back to Darby's old bedroom and shut the door. Rowan and Dean came from opposite ends of the house to see what had happened.
 
Blake slumped into the couch and sighed heavily.

"What's up?" Dean asked.

"The poor guy is losing it. I can't say I blame him. I probably would have lost it a lot sooner than he did if it had been you out there, Rowan."

"He's been through a lot. Did you really have to pin him like that?" Rowan asked.

"I don't know. I panicked. He said he was leaving. If Dimitri's having the place watched, he certainly can't be leaving like that."

"I know but one of the problems he has is that he is in a house full of supernatural beings with powers he doesn't fully understand and he feels he doesn't have anything to contribute. He's feeling useless."

"I know...I know...I blew it. I'll apologize when he has had time to cool down. Devon would have handled this so much better. He's so much better with people than I am. I've been feeling so crappy about giving up on Darby when my own brother had been held in chains for months. I really screwed up. How is Devon ever going to forgive me? If Darby hadn't found and fed him when she did, he'd be dead right now and I would have never known. I'd just be hanging in California minding my own business while on the other coast my brother laid on his deathbed because I gave up on him. How can I be any help to Melanie and Josh when I can’t even help my own brother?"

Rowan didn't say anything. She was wrestling with the same guilt. She tried to comfort him by putting her arm around him, but Blake was too angry with himself to accept such a gesture. He got up and started pacing the living room.

Dean finally spoke up. "I know you two are beating yourselves up with guilt, but it will work itself out. My guess is that the relationship you both had with them has changed forever." Rowan and Blake both looked at him with astonishment.

"I'm sorry, guys, it’s the truth,” Dean said. “But it's not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, come on. Did you seriously think that all four of you would live under the same roof forever? Come on! Things had to change eventually. Maybe this isn't the way you thought it would be, but I think in the big picture, this is all going to work out just fine. The kid does have a point. We need to do something.
 
We can't just leave that poor girl out there driving around in Devon's car forever!"
 

"I know, but I don't know what to do!” Blake exclaimed. “This was more Devon's forte, Darby's too."

"Well, little brother, looks like you need to step up and grow some..." Dean started as Rowan gave him a look of disapproval that he had seen only from Darby in the past. "What I meant to say is Devon would want you to help this couple so try to think of what Devon would do in this situation and do it, fang-faced moron."

Blake shook his head in disbelief. "You didn't just call me 'a fang faced moron' did you, fuzz face?"

"Now I told you not to call me that, vamp boy."

The next thing Rowan knew, Dean had Blake in a headlock. She shook her head as she left the room and headed towards the kitchen to start dinner.

Melanie woke to a rather cloudy morning sky.
 
It was apparent some kind of weather was forming and it didn't look like it was going to be pretty.
 
Today she would be traveling up to Bangor Maine to run the credit card and then sleep in Manchester, New Hampshire. She stopped for lunch in Bangor and on the paper placemat she learned some interesting facts. Apparently, it is the most important Eastern lumber town in the US, there's a 31 foot Paul Bunyan on the way into town, and 60 million pounds of lobster come from Maine every year. She grabbed a matchbook and jotted down the info. She tried to do this every time she got a matchbook, because she knew she'd never remember all the cool things she had learned.
 

Like in Abilene, Texas where she slept the first night, she learned that it was considered the 'buckle of the bible belt' and that up until 1925 it was a misdemeanor to flirt in a public place. In Las Cruces, New Mexico there was a giant Road Runner made of trash on I-10. In the open ranges of Arizona there are yield signs with bulls on them. Louisiana is the only state divided by parishes not counties. Montgomery Alabama was where the famous Selma to Montgomery Civil Rights March ended and Viola Liuzzo was killed for giving a young man a ride home. Virginia Beach has the world's largest naval base and was one of the first colonies.

When she got to Manchester, she found a used bookstore and bought herself a little road travel book for more interesting facts on places she would be visiting during her journey. She looked at all of her matchbooks then thought of her father.
 
He used to smoke a pipe and she always thought how amazing it was that he could light a match from a matchbook with one hand and with hardly any effort.
 
Over the years she had tried his technique only to find that she could go through the whole book of matches without getting a single one to light and in the process mutilated the poor matches into unrecognizable objects.
How did he do that?
she thought.

That only brought on more sad thoughts of the accident that had set her on such a lonely path. She wondered if they had survived the accident what they would have thought of her abilities to see past events. Like her aunt, would her parents have made her wear gloves the rest of her life in an attempt to make things more normal?
 
She liked to think her parents would have been understanding, but she could never know that for sure.

She cried for a moment as she thought about her parents and wished she could have said goodbye to them. She missed them so much. Now that she had met Josh, she missed him almost as much.
 
She thought about how silly she was for thinking that there had been something between them; after all, they barely knew each other, but she couldn't help the way she felt either. She lay in bed for a long time that night, thinking of her parents and Josh. So often now she would dream of Josh, like he was in the room with her.
 
She could smell the saltiness of his skin and feel the loose curls of his hair on her cheek. She could almost feel the strength of his arms around her, as she lay on her side in the queen-sized bed. It had to be a dream - there was no one there, but if she concentrated hard enough, she could swear she could hear the slow, shallow breathing of his sleep next to her right ear. It was comforting to her whether real or not. She knew she was getting too attached to Josh if she could imagine so much detail in her dreams, but feeling as lonely as she did on this trip, she didn't care. It helped her sleep to think somehow he was there.
 

Chapter 17

Josh was making coffee. More often than not, he was the first one up in the morning. It was a nice quiet time when he could write in the notebook what he saw and felt in his journeys.
 
He wasn't sure it was real, but real or not, it was comforting being near Lanie.
 
He was missing her more than he ever thought possible; her hypnotic blue eyes, the way she smiled and blushed when she got embarrassed, the smell of her hair. The more he thought about her, the edgier he got towards his housemates.
 

They had been so good to him, but all this waiting was wearing on him.
 
Having been used to being on his own in his own little world, he was out of practice at being forced to socialize.
 
His people skills were getting better and with the exercises Blake had taught him, he could keep their thoughts at bay. Being forced to live with them made him work that much harder to hone the skill of keeping them out of his head.
 
Once he had the tools to do so, he was eager to use them and he was getting really good at it.

He thought how different his life would have been if someone had taught him these skills as a child.
 
He could have had friends and dated more successfully.
 
He thought about the Order of the Black Orchids and its original goal to educate.
 
How nice it would have been to be able to go to such a place and learn these things. There must be others out there like him, lost and confused by powers they don't understand wishing they could find answers and solutions to questions that seemed impossible to solve on their own.

He sat at the kitchen table watching the sun spill in through the window as he thought about these things, when Blake shuffled down the hall and into the kitchen. He headed straight for the coffee and a bag of bagels on the counter, and then sat at the table with Josh.
 

"Morning."

"Hey," Josh replied.

"Look, I want to apologize for yesterday. I went a little 'Rambo' on you and I shouldn't have. I guess I've had a lot on my mind since we got back from Connecticut and I overreacted."

"It's fine."

"It's not fine. It was over the line. I've been racking my brain for over a week now, trying to come up with some way to fix this problem we have with Dimitri.
 
Usually Devon is the one who does that stuff. He's a better people-person than I could ever hope to be.
 
I tend to be too hot headed. I'm usually the bruiser, where he's always been the planner. I've never had to fill his shoes before and I'm frustrated to say that I suck at it."

"Really, it's fine.
 
I'm not a people-person either.
 
I've never had to worry about anyone but myself and now I'm going crazy over worrying about Lanie. I don’t know what to do with myself.
 
I don't understand it, and I doubt I'm doing anything right. It was selfish of me to try and leave. You were right. I can't just think about myself anymore.
 
I've gotten all of you involved in this huge mess and I shouldn't do anything that will put you in any more danger than I already have. Besides, you must really be going through your own kind of hell with finding your brother that way. Rowan explained a bit about what happened. I suppose you are beating yourself up about as much is she is. You couldn't have known what your cousin's wife was up to."